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Fight for the Fifth District

The Massachusetts fifth Congressional district will hold a special election on October 16 to fill the seat vacated by longtime representative Marty Meehan, who resigned from the House of Representatives on July 1.

Meehan, who represented the fifth district for 14 years, left his seat to become chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Meehan graduated from the university in 1978.

The fight for the seat, once thought to be a Democratic shoe-in, has become fierce. The Democratic candidate Niki Tsongas, widow of Paul Tsongas, held the Congressional seat in the fifth from 1974 to 1978, served as a Massachusetts senator from 1978 to 1984, and ran for president in 1992.

The Republican candidate Jim Ogonowski is a retired Air Force lieutenant and businessman whose brother was a pilot on one of the flights hijacked on 9/11 out of Logan airport.

Tsongas’ main strategy is to nationalize the election–she wants to encourage voters to vote on national issues like the war in Iraq and health care instead of local issues. She attempts to use the unpopularity of President George W. Bush to her advantage.

“Make no mistake this election will be a referendum on the presidency of George W. Bush,” Tsongas said in her victory speech after she won the Democratic primary against Lowell City Councillor Eileen Donoghue.

For his part, Jim Ogonowski pitches himself as a down-toearth small businessman and farmer. His television commercial features images of him on a tractor and states: “we don’t a tractor and states: “we don’t need another politician.”

Furthermore, he has been fighting against Tsongas’ portrayals of his opinion on the war.

“The Bush administration has made many mistakes,” he said in a September 14 press release.